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Gary Montelongo from Sullivan City is just like other teenagers — he likes playing sports and hanging out with his friends — but his passion for engineering has earned him to be named among the top 30 finalists in the prestigious Society of Science Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge.
A ninth grader at Thelma Salinas Early College STEM High School, Montelongo will compete in Washington D.C for more than $100,000 in awards.
The Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge is the nation’s premier STEM competition which aims to inspire young scientists, engineers and innovators who will solve the challenges of the future.
The 30 finalists were selected by a nationwide panel of scientists, engineers and educators based on the student’s scientific research projects.
Montelongo said he received the news about being selected in the top 30 during school where he stepped out of class to take the call.
“It’s still like a shock to me,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting it. It was the last thing on my mind that was going to happen. It was really exciting. I’m really happy that it did happen and I’m getting the opportunity to actually go all the way to Washington to show my project.”
Montelongo’s research project involved a railway train’s suspension system which he got the inspiration for interning as a middle schooler at the UTRGV University Transportation Center for Railway Safety (UTCRS).
He was interning at UTCRS around the time when a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Garcia would drive her son everyday for three summers about two to three hours to Edinburg and back for him to participate.
Montelongo first started showing signs of interest in coding and engineering when his mother Nancy Garcia would take him with her to work at the center during the summer.
“I was teaching some high school students and he kind of just got in and said ‘I could help him Mom,’ and Dr. (Constantine Tarawneh) noticed that he was coding for the students,” she said.
Already doing middle school level coding in elementary, by the time he got to seventh grade, Tarawneh offered him a spot on a high school internship program.
“He came and I would task him with things to do, and he was working as if he was an undergraduate student,” he said. “He would go and figure it out and then the students would start challenging him with things to see if he could do it.”
Not being surprised by his recent accomplishment, Tarawneh, the director of the UTCRS, said Montelongo has everything a researcher needs in skills, passion and commitment.
“This is why I do what I do,” he said. “The K-12 camps, it’s time consuming and it’s a lot of effort … because every now and then you get these unique kids that make it worth your while … and say I did have an impact on his life. He’s different.
“When you see an elementary kid being able to figure out the programming faster than the middle school (students) who were getting the curriculum, and then he actually was helping the teachers figure out things. … It’s these success stories like Gary that kind of puts a bow tie on what we’re doing.”
Montelongo is set to compete next week in Washington D.C and wants his achievement to be an inspiration for his younger siblings and also for his community.
“It really just helps me kind of use it as something to show people who live in the same area as me,” he said. “Sullivan (City) isn’t the best economically so it’s kind of just showing people that live there, just because we live there doesn’t mean we have to give up and work up north … There’s always a way to do it here as long as they stay dedicated to school.”
Garcia said she is proud of her son and is eager to see what is next for him.
“You never know what you’re cultivating until you see the big part of it and so I’ve seen him bloom,” she said.
Montelongo plans to study aerospace engineering in the future at UTRGV or Texas A&M College Station and has dreams of working for NASA or SpaceX.
